University Presses Walsh, S: Living Poetically

""Living Poetically addresses the debate over Kierkegaard and aesthetics with impressive authority. Walsh demonstrates that contemporary post-modern efforts to idealize the aesthetic in abstraction from the ethical and the religious are no more responsible than older voices that viewed the aesthetic with little more than suspicion. She argues that Kierkegaard embraces all three, for life is really complete only when paradoxical faith and ethical freedom are both infused with poetic richness.""-Stephen Dunning, University of Pennsylvania ""Living Poetically is a magnificent piece of work on a very important theme. The concepts of the aesthetic and the poetic in Kierkegaard have been much neglected, so this is a book that will make a real contribution; it will immediately become the standard work on this subject and will probably remain so for a long time to come. Walsh has an absolute mastery of the Kierkegaardian corpus and a truly impressive command of the secondary literature, yet she wears this learning lightly. In addition to the intrinsic interest of the themes treated, the contemporary relevance of the book is greatly enhanced by the running polemic with some French feminists who have allied feminism with postmodernism. Though Walsh is certainly a feminist herself, and though she clearly scores Kierkegaard for sexist claims, she argues that there is a deep affinity between this kind of postmodernist feminism and the romantic ironists who are the main targets of Kierkegaard's criticisms. The claim that Kierkegaard's criticisms of romantic ironists apply with force to some versions of contemporary postmodernism is certain to be controversial, but so far as I can see, the case Walsh makes is well done, and this is exactly the kind of critical discussion that postmodern thinkers need.""-C. Stephen Evans, St. Olaf College Living Poetically is the first book to focus primarily on Kierkegaard's existential aesthetics as opposed to traditional aesthetic featu